While several patches to Oakland and San Francisco’s tenant rent laws have made the news over the past weeks—notably, the flawed and insufficient Capital Improvements modifying legislation in Oakland, and increases in minimums of Ellis Act Eviction buy outs in San Francisco—there has been more than one potentially catastrophic piece of extra-judicial anti-tenant legislation inching […]

A recent New York Times piece on Google Bus and Anti-Google actions in the SF Bay Area holds some unlikely insights for those seeking to fight gentrification in San Francisco and Oakland. “Demonstrators regularly block the shuttles. Last week, a group of activists stalked a Google engineer at his East Bay house, urging the masses […]

Halfway through the public comments on Tuesday’s Domain Awareness Center vote at the Public Safety Committee meeting, an older African American woman took the podium, the first and only Black person to speak on the issue that night. In her comments, she concretized the vague unease which many might have felt watching one after another […]

Tarcilo Caldera is a thirty year old member of the Port Trucker’s Association [POTA]. He moved to the US from Nicaragua with his family at the age of five—his father has been a Port trucker since 1989 and his mother is a janitor in San Francisco. Trucking is in Tarcilo’s blood. He spent summers with […]

Volumes have already been written about the protests in Oakland that exploded after the Zimmerman verdict on Saturday, July 13. I won’t delve deeply into some of the so-called “controversies”, because they are political constructs created by city officials and OPD. Trying to camouflage their own complicity in maintaining the system of police and systemic […]

One of the public sphere alleyways that keeps cropping up around the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is the issue of the “race” of Zimmerman. The main current holds that Zimmerman is ‘white’, with a pushback from those that counter he is mixed race and/or Latino, because of his Latin American heritage. The […]

We went to two former adult schools in East Oakland today to do some support outreach and visibility for tonight’s action at OUSD–The Bond Street Adult School Annex in Fruitvale, and Edward Shands Adult School right next to Eastmont Mall. We set up our materials and painted our banners and did chalk messages on the […]